John C. Wright's Journal

A reader with the ancient yet aquatic name of Nereus writes as follows:

Having read your recent posts on fine tuning, I would like to offer you a challenge on your summary of the fine tuning argument, or else a refinement if you will. I offer this in good spirit as a fan of your much of your writing. (I own about 2/3 of the books you’ve authored, read your entire Everyjoe series of columns, and several of your political columns on your blog have greatly benefited my thinking.) I am also a fellow Christian, but I do not have any of the accounts needed to join the comments on your blog. Unfortunately, I’ve only been following your work since shortly before you were published by Castalia, when someone in the comments on Vox’s blog referred to you as the G. K. Chesterton of our day, a moniker I find suited to you more often than not.

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I see in the comments from my last post that it may have been unclear. A word is in order.

Please note that the column there is only addressing the fine-tuning argument.

Such arguments propose, for example, that the Earth must be precisely her current distance from the sun for the liquid water to be found on her surface without which life cannot arise, and the moon just so to prevent the Earth from dying under meteor impacts, or the precise properties of subatomic particles for atoms to form, or the precise values of physical constants for the Big Bang to have expanded, and so on.

The argument then proposes some number value expressing the number of times, out of a hundred, universes have been formed where these physical constants and distances differed.

This value is always not merely arbitrary, but illogical.

The argument finally proposes that this value is so small that it is beyond imagination it could have arisen by chance. Anything not done by change is done by design; ergo the cosmos had a designer, and this all men know to be God.

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I often hear argument that the precise physical constants, or the location of Earth, Moon and Sun, are so carefully ordered to produce life on Earth, that intelligent design, not any natural process operating without intent, must be the cause. The universe is too orderly to have arisen by nature. The hand of God must be in it.

Of course, I have heard the opposite argument offered with equal fervor. Mortality, pain, disease, or natural disasters, the vastness of space, the depth of time, and the confusion and sorrow of even the happiest life on Earth precludes the possibility of any direction manning the cosmos: ergo all must be blind, pitiless, and godforsaken.

Both as an atheist and as a Christian I never understood the appeal of either argument. They are twin brothers in that both suffer the same fallacy. Both are begging the question.

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